1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to a social networks and particularly to a solution wherein a user can automatically register and subscribe to one or more social networks based on his current location.
2. Related Art
Mobile devices are becoming ubiquitous. Children carry them and so do adults. Most people working in customer facing industries use mobile phones to stay in touch with their customers and take phone calls throughout the day. Unfortunately, quite a few users of mobile phones are intimidated by technology or technically challenged, and cannot effectively use the mobile devices to solve their problems. For such people, mobile phones are useful only for voice calls. All those powerful applications on their mobile devices are beyond their capability. This is a major problem not adequately addressed by creators of mobile applications.
Social networks are a useful means to interact with other like minded individuals. They are popular with the youth and with technically savvy individuals who can work on computers. However, quite a few non-technical people are incapable of mastering the use of computers and are therefore unable to participate in such social networks. Thus, despite the growing number of computer users, millions of people still cannot participate on social networks. Some individuals who have access to a computer are still unable to master the skills required to discover, subscribe to, effectively register with and start using the social networks.
Social networks are often accessed from computers over the Internet. Sites such as Facebook and MySpace are quite popular. A user with access to a computer can open an account with these social networks, provide a detailed profile, and then participate in interacting with others. However, very few of the people in the world, especially those in third world countries have access to computers. Those that have computers do not have access to the Internet. Among those that have both a computer and access to Internet, a significant number of these do not know how to enroll in or use the social networks. Thus, access to these social networks is unavailable to a significant number of people, or is complicated.
Quite a few technology-challenged individuals would like to manipulate the tiny keyboards on mobile phones and access remote servers and manage interactions with remote applications. Unfortunately, the small keys on the keyboard, the small screens of these mobile phones, the inability to read those screens, especially outdoors in the sun, etc. make them use the mobile phones only for voice calls, even when these phones are high-end phones with complex operating systems. Thus, despite the availability of a powerful operating system and applications on the mobile phones, a significant number of users only use them for voice calls. Thus these applications go unused. There is a need to better design these applications so that they are more useable by non-technical and technology-challenged people. There is also a need to create applications that do not rely upon (or that minimize) the use of keyboards on these mobile phones.
Mobile phones are currently being sold to farmers and rural users in third world countries. Unfortunately, very few of these can read or speak in English. Most mobile phones do not provide applications that are customized to these languages. Often, within a geographical region, several different languages are spoken. Mobile operators do not support all of those local languages. Thus, screens of information provided to users or prompts for user input are often presented in the wrong and incomprehensible languages to these rural users.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art through comparison of such systems with various aspects of the present invention.